“It’s old stuff, CAG. No big deal, just a personality conflict.”
“Personality conflict, my ass. That’s like calling the gunfight at the O. K. Corral a friendly argument. My gut hunch is that there’s a story about how this shit started with you and DeLancey.”
Maxwell deliberated, drumming his fingers on the table for a moment. CAG’s hunch was right: There was a story, and it went back over a decade. But it was one he couldn’t tell. Not now. Perhaps not ever.
“Sorry, sir. It’s personal.”
As CAG glowered at him, Maxwell peered across the room at the far bulkhead. He allowed his mind to fly back in time, to a black January night over Iraq.
Chapter Eight
Night One
He remembered how eerily quiet it had been on the flight deck. No jet engines running, no tugs, vehicles, catapults, arresting engines. The air was still. You could hear a whisper. Saratoga had not yet turned into the wind.
“Those guys are counting on us,” Lieutenant Commander Gracie Allen was saying as they walked across the deck. “The F-15s, the B-52s, the Stinkbugs — they’re gonna get their asses shot off if we don’t take out the radars first.”
They were walking line abreast — Allen, Maxwell, Rasmussen, and DeLancey. Maxwell could hear the clunk of their flight boots on the steel deck.
“When we get close,” Allen said, “take your individual strike lines and assigned altitudes. That’s the only way we can de-conflict, because we’re gonna be too busy to watch each other.”
The briefing had been efficient, without hyperbole. They had devoted the past month to studying their likely targets, planning run-in lines, rehearsing tactics.
Maxwell was a new lieutenant, a nugget only three months in the squadron. His section leader was a slow-talking lieutenant commander named Gracie Allen. The leader of the second section was Lieutenant Commander Raz Rasmussen, a jovial, blonde-haired guy with a quick wit. Rasmussen’s wingman that night was a cocky, flamboyant lieutenant named John DeLancey.
Even in those days DeLancey and Maxwell hadn’t hit it off. Neither could explain the bad chemistry between them, but they both understood that it was an instinctive thing. To DeLancey, the more senior and experienced squadron officer, Maxwell was too cerebral, too introspective to be a fighter pilot. Maxwell, for his part, disdained DeLancey’s noisy swaggering and posturing. The two men avoided each other.
Gracie Allen had overall lead of the four-ship flight, with the call sign “Anvil.” Their job was to shoot HARMs — anti-radiation missiles intended to snuff out Iraq’s air defense radars. The mission was critical because the inbound strike aircraft — other F-18s, F-15s, F-111s, B-52s — all depended on them. The HARM shooters had to take out the deadly barrage of radar-directed anti-aircraft guns and SAM batteries or the coalition air forces would be decimated before they reached their targets.
In the stillness of the evening, they manned their jets. Twenty minutes later they launched from the deck of the Saratoga. They were headed for Baghdad.
The winter night was clear and smooth. The SEAD — Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses — package amounted to nearly forty jets, F/A-18 Hornets and A-7 Corsairs from Saratoga, America, and Kennedy. They remained in a single cluster until reaching the splitup point, 120 miles from the target.
The lights of Baghdad glimmered on the horizon. Already they could see flashes, explosions, tracers arcing into the sky. It meant that the stealth fighters — the F-117 “Stinkbugs” — were in the target area.
Maxwell tried to make sense of the hysterical chatter on the tactical frequency. Everyone was transmitting at once, cutting each other off.
As dash two, he was flying on the left flank of the four-ship. He was nearly overwhelmed trying to keep track of his leader, check his radar, check his position and distance to go, listen to the relentless chatter on the radio. In the blackness he could no longer see Gracie Allen out there on his right. At the split point, each of the Hornets had taken a two-mile separation and five-hundred feet of altitude difference from the adjoining jet. From now until the missile launch point, each pilot was on his own.
Then, cutting like a knife through the chatter: “Bogey! Twelve o’clock, thirty miles!”
Instantly, every pilot’s head went to his radar. Where? Whose twelve o’clock? Is it a MiG?
Maxwell tagged him. On his radar he was getting an EID. — Electronic Identification. It was a MiG-25, codenamed “Foxbat.”
The other three pilots in Anvil Flight picked him up at the same time. Twenty-five miles, closing fast.
But they couldn’t shoot. At least not yet. According to the rules of engagement read to them at the mission briefing, an electronic ID was not good enough. There were too many allied warplanes in the same airspace. The Hornets were required to obtain a positive identification from the AWACS. Or get a VID — Visual Identification — which at night was impossible.
Maxwell heard Gracie Allen on the tac frequency: “Request clearance to fire on the bogey.”
“Who’s that?” said the AWACS controller. “Say your call sign.”
Maxwell watched the blip on his radar. Twenty miles. The MiG was coming directly at him. Maxwell selected air-to-air mode on his weapons selector. Five more miles and I’m gonna shoot.
Gracie was yelling on the radio. “Anvil Flight has a bogey at twenty miles! We need clearance—”
Bleep.
“—clearance. Do you have PID? State your —”
Bleep.
Each transmission was being overridden by another.
Fifteen miles.
Maxwell saw something in his radar, at the far extreme of his gimbals. It looked like —
Shit! Another bogey! A second MiG, two miles abeam the first.
“Trailer!” Maxwell transmitted. “Two miles —”
Bleep. He was cut out. He tried again to send a warning. Then he heard something that chilled his blood: His RWR was howling at high pitch.
A missile was in the air. Coming at him.
Captain Jabbar had no illusions about what would happen. The night sky was filled with enemy fighters. The mother of all battles had been joined.
“Make your peace with Allah,” his flight leader, Lieutenant Colonel Al-Rashid told him before they took off. “We will be joining him tonight.”
He and Al-Rashid had barely reached altitude in their MiG-25s when they observed the line of enemy fighters. Jabbar’s heart nearly stopped. It looked on his radar like an advancing armada. The line stretched a hundred kilometers. All flying north, toward Baghdad.
Jabbar’s Sirena was chirping, but it did not yet indicate that they were being targeted. They had the advantage, for the moment.
On the radio, Rashid reported, “I have a lock on the far right fighter. Take the left.”
On his own radar, Jabbar slewed his target acquisition box over the blip of another enemy fighter. He prepared to shoot.
A second later, Jabbar saw the white plume of Rashid’s Acrid missile rocketing off into the night.
“Anvil 41, spiked and defending!” Maxwell yelled into the radio.
He yanked the Hornet into a max-G break. The RWR was warbling like a crazed parrot.
Hard right and down. Outturn the missile. Pull!